Pencil Cup

“I see you have some very finely sharpened pencils,” a friend’s son remarked to me after staying in my apartment last summer.

It was true. The apartment was a little disorganized, because I had let David Rees and a crew use it to shoot a commercial for his book “How to Sharpen Pencils.” I play a woman frustrated by her inability to achieve the perfect pencil point: This pencil is too dull! This pencil is too pointy. David, who would film his part separately, played the late-night-TV guy whose pitch begins with some variation of “Has this ever happened to you?”

My home office backs up onto the kitchen, so the spatulas and liquor bottles on the countertop had to be stashed away and replaced with a row of generic-looking books. Anything splashy would be distracting. I hauled out my old gray Norton Anthology, pulled the bold jacket off of Homer, and blew the dust off some ancient brick-colored volumes of Robert Graves. It had not previously occurred to me that there was an honest use for faux books.

I had to clear my desk and remove my pencil cups, which were also deemed too distracting. One is a souvenir of Greece that Kalamata olives came in; it is a dual-language pencil cup. Another, brassy with a honeycomb pattern, once held Greek honey (it is now stuffed with bookmarks).“Do you have a plain glass tumbler?” the director asked. I found a glass of unknown provenance—not only do none of my glasses match but each one looks like it came from a different civilization—and plunked some pencils in it. The effect was surprisingly charming, like a clean bouquet.

When we were done, David offered to sharpen some pencils for me. I was thrilled. He got out a manual sharpener, green, that looked like my Carl Angel 5 (which I had taken to Rockaway and which, I am happy to say, survived Hurricane Sandy), and expertly sharpened a handful of assorted pencils: a Mirado Black Warrior, a Sanford, a Faber American Natural, a found Papermate, a few prized Palomino Blackwings, a red-white-and-blue giveaway from a patriotic supplier of home medical equipment (where did that come from?), a mysterious yellow-and-black striped Staedtler Noris with a green-painted tip instead of a ferrule and eraser—an émigré from Germany. The points were extra long and, especially on a long-stemmed pencil, elegant in the extreme. David explained that he was using a long-point sharpener, a favorite in schools. I was embarrassed when graphite from one of my defective Ticonderogas broke off in it, jamming the blades. But David reacted calmly. He opened up the sharpener, selected a toothpick from his kit (no ordinary toothpick, but one of those scrolled-top ones that you find at fancy restaurants), and surgically removed a lump of graphite about the size of a carpenter ant.

The commercial is on the air now, on cable, in the wee hours. “You’ll know which of your friends stay up late watching TV,” the director said. I’ve left my finely sharpened pencils in the glass, which has officially been promoted to a pencil cup. By now, anything I drank out of it would taste like pencils.

Mary Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978, and has been a query proofreader at the magazine since 1993. Her first book—“Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen” (Norton)—comes out on April 6th.